The Good Neighbor Page 6

  Of Marly’s ten children, two died at birth, one died before she had learned to walk, one died of tuberculosis, and one drowned in

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  the nearby river, which was deeper and faster then than it is now. This was not to mention the two who died in the flower of adult hood, during the outbreak of the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed more people in the United States than all twentieth-century wars combined, yet which is almost never spoken of, or indeed remem bered, by anyone now alive. Of ten Musgrove children, in fact, only three lived long enough to die of old age: Hamish and Ellen, who were fraternal twins, and their younger sister, Lucia.

  The Captain and his wife buried their young children, one by one, in a little cemetery on the far end of the property, which in later years would become hidden by creeping wisteria and lilac, as well as the second growth of the trees that had been cut down to build the house. The five Musgroves who survived early child hood—Hamish, Ellen, Lucia, Olivia, and Margaret—were accus tomed to visiting the cemetery often in their youth. They played their loud and carefree games six feet above the decomposing bod ies of their siblings, imagining, with a sense of duty, that they were keeping them company, that they were all having fun to gether.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  One day in 1859, a traveling salesman stopped into Adencourt for a glass of water. The Captain, rocking on the porch, saw him walking up the road; he hailed the yellow-haired man with a roar and the casual two-fingered salute that he’d adapted from his Army days, which had become his trademark. As it turned out, the man had seen some of the same western country the Captain had; they fell to talking about the vastness of the world, and lying frankly to each other about how well they were acquainted with it. The Captain appreciated a good liar, as long as he was honest about it; so the salesman, whose name was McNally, was invited to spend the night.

  Noting the Captain’s physical discomfort at dinner, McNally

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  alluded to the fact that he had a smattering of medical knowledge. The Captain allowed as how he wasn’t one to complain, but see ing that the gentleman was in the medical way, he might as well tell him about his various aches and pains, to see what might be done about them—he hadn’t had any luck with regular doctors. When the towheaded salesman left the next morning, it was with a full belly and a brand-new pair of shoes. In exchange, he’d left behind six bottles of McNally’s Special Oriental Health Tonic, which was approximately 80 percent alcohol, 19 percent water, and 1 percent opium.

  The stuff was the answer to the Captain’s prayers. It eased his la bored breathing and it allowed him to sleep the whole night through for the first time in years. He was not a drinking man, but since he didn’t know what was in McNally’s Tonic, that didn’t matter. The salesman had assured him that it was a secret mixture of herbs known only to a few Eastern wise men, with whom he, McNally, had entered into an exclusive agreement during his world travels. He would be passing by this way again in several weeks; he would be happy to stop in on the Captain and replenish his supply of the tonic, though next time, being a man of business, he would have to charge him full price. Surely the Captain would understand. A few weeks passed. After noticing that the tonic had become less effective, the Captain began to up his dosage. He went from one tablespoon in the evenings to two, and added one in the after noons. Soon he stopped using the spoon and started using a glass. By the time he’d emptied three bottles, he was back to being an insomniac, only this time he suffered from cold sweats, paranoia, and headaches that threatened to rip him down the middle. He sometimes fancied that all the men he’d ever killed were standing in a circle around his house, waiting—Indian and Mexican side by side, united in their wish to gather him unto their cold and ragged bosoms. His old pain was gone, but it had been replaced by a creeping sense of doom, plus a horrible, empty feeling that the Captain had no name for, but one that consumed him all the

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  same: addiction. He didn’t want to drink any more of McNally’s tonic, but he was afraid to stop. He forced himself to drink it even when he didn’t feel like it, in order to stave off the inevitable shakes and bouts of anxiety that came every few hours. By the time he had upended the last of the six bottles, the Captain had begun both to fear and pray for the reappearance of the salesman. Marly, now twenty-six years old, hardly knew what to think.

  She hadn’t been to school beyond the age of twelve, and she knew nothing about the mysterious world of medicine. All she knew was that in a short time, her husband had become incapacitated, and the running of the farm was left to her. It was too much to handle. She took to keeping a loaded shotgun by the door, and a sharp eye out.

  McNally showed up exactly when he said he would, no doubt already calculating the profits he would make from this easy sale. He was greeted at the door, where he stood with his hat in his hands, by the business end of the shotgun, which he found aimed at his mouth. At the other end of it was Marly Musgrove, preg nant then for the eighth and final time.

  “Turn about, McNally,” she said. “March.”

  McNally smirked. The sun glinted off his hair as though it was spun gold. “What are yeh goin’ to do, missy?” he asked, raising his hands slowly. “Does yer mister know yer playin’ with his scatter- gun?”

  “The Captain doesn’t know his own name, hardly,” said Marly. “Now get moving.”

  She marched the salesman across the road to the river and down behind the trees, where no one would see or hear them. She made him take off his clothes and throw them in the water, along with his traveling suitcase. By this time, McNally’s smirk had dis appeared, and he had developed a bad feeling about his future, for it appeared the woman was serious. Though naked, he kept his hat on out of modesty. His quivering hands were raised high above his head.

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  “Look here at me,” said Marly.

  McNally did so. When he saw the expression on Marly’s face, he began to cry, because he knew she was going to kill him.

  “What’s the cure?” she asked him.

  “There ain’t no cure, lady,” said McNally, trying unsuccessfully to stifle his sobs. “You got to lock him in a room till he gets over it. There ain’t no other way.”

  “Will he die of it?” Marly asked.

  “I don’t know,” sobbed McNally. “Maybe.”

  That was all Marly needed to hear. She pulled both triggers si multaneously, knocking herself onto her back. When she managed to sit up again, the salesman had already floated a hundred feet down the river, amid a great red, blue, and green slick of blood and entrails.

  Marly got to her feet and went back into the house, gun still smoking, shoulder aching. She could not bring herself to look at him. Her children would have heard the blast; she would tell them she’d shot at a fox. The Captain would be upstairs in bed, three days into his enforced drying-out period. She wouldn’t tell him anything, because he would think he’d dreamed the noise. She would have to hope that the body would never be found, though there was a good chance that it would be. If so, she knew, she her self would be among the least likely suspects. She was the Cap tain’s wife, after all. And without clothes, the man might be anybody: a gambler, a convict, a bank robber, a gypsy. He would be buried in a paupers’ cemetery, and she was hopeful it would be assumed that someone had merely given him his just desserts.

  Which, of course, someone had.

  A couple of weeks later, when the Captain was finally starting to feel like himself again, he said: “If that damned salesman ever dares to show his face around here again, I’ll blast him with the shotgun.”

  “I guess he won’t,” said Marly quietly. “Likely someone else’ll get him first.”

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  “What was his name again?” asked the Captain. “I forget.” But Marly wouldn’t say it.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  Two years later, the Civil War erupted, and the Captain decided he was going to w
ar for the third time in his life. To tell the truth, he’d been praying for something like this. He could barely contain his ex citement. His body may have been largely useless by then, his breath nothing more than a feeble butterfly-wing breeze, but he could, by God, still command. The battlefield was where he was most at home, anyway. Domestic life drove him crazy, mostly be cause he had to deal with so many women—he understood women far less than men or horses, and he didn’t particularly like horses.

  Before marrying his cousin, the Captain had never experienced the peace and quiet of a farm. Not as a grown man, that is. He’d entered the Army at fourteen, and had hoped, even at that tender age, to die in its service. While the virtues of home life had been extolled by the older soldiers in the form of songs and stories around the campfire, he realized now that it was only the contrast to violence and uncertainty that made it seem so pleasant. In truth, he was dying of boredom, and with scarcely a word to any one, he put on his old uniform and went to Philadelphia, never to be seen again.

  In time, his family was to learn—without much emotion— that he’d been killed in Gettysburg, a no-account Pennsylvania county to the south and middle of the state. When Hamish Mus- grove, then ten years old, heard the news about his father, he went onto the porch and lay underneath the withered Indian scalps, looking up at them as they wandered gently in the breeze. These belong to dead people, he thought, and now my father is dead. For several minutes he lay there, trying to make a connection. When none was forthcoming, he gave up. He hadn’t cared for his father very much, anyway. No one had.

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  This left Hamish, Ellen, and Lucia; the twins, Olivia and Mar garet, who would later die of influenza; and Marly. Marly cut down the Indian scalps from the rafters and tossed them onto a refuse fire, where they gave off an unexpectedly sweet, purifying smell, like burning sage. The house settled comfortably around them like a blanket. It had an air of childhood about it, a feeling of renaissance. Things had gotten lighter. Life, now that the Captain was gone, was quiet and good.

  These were the first people to live in the house, and so they are important. A house becomes like those who build it, true, but also like those who inhabit it. To take the elements of the earth and re shape them into something as magnificent and comfortable as a house is a feat of wonder. Yet creating something, or watching it be created, is not the same as owning it. It’s the spirit that comes into a house after it’s born that determines what kind of house it will be, what kind of life it will have. It’s the people who move through it day after day, like a stream of blood through a many- chambered heart, that make it have a feel and a smell and a way. Eventually, the Captain wore off, and though no story about the house would be complete without him at the beginning of it, he plays no part in the end.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  When they were just eighteen years old, Hamish and Ellen moved first to Harrisburg and then to Pittsburgh, where they shared an apartment and did not object when people mistook them for hus band and wife. This was in 1870. After a time, they stopped com ing home for holidays, and even their own family gradually forgot about them. Lucia, their sister, later married an immigrant farmer and settled in the house, which by now had lost all traces of the Captain—a lucky thing, since he would have been mortified at her choice of husband, who had not a drop of English blood in his body, only Bavarian. Lucia had three children. Of those, her eldest

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  son, Lincoln—survivor of the runaway-horse incident—inherited the farm and house.

  When Lincoln was put into the nursing home where he would witness the last significant event of his lifetime, he passed the house on to Helen, his oldest daughter, a beautiful woman with a taste for cruel men. Helen attempted to sell the old place several times, but she found, to her consternation, that she couldn’t. There was no explanation for it; her hand simply refused to sign the papers, time and again, until realtors and bankers began to re gard her as eccentric and manipulative. She couldn’t have known it was the pull of the old children’s cemetery, now forgotten and hidden by undergrowth, that prevented her. It still exerted its in fluence on all who shared Musgrove blood, like a small moon over a private sea. It would not be abandoned.

  Instead, Helen had Adencourt remodeled. The house had never been glorious or beautiful; it had merely been new, once. She tried to recapture that state as much as she could, replacing rotted wood and shoring up the first floor from the basement, fumigat ing for termites, repainting, reroofing, adding drywall in some rooms, and modernizing the plumbing and electrical works that had been added around the turn of the century.

  This, as it turned out, was the major task of Helen’s life. She would never accomplish anything more useful than this. She was not the marrying sort, though it took her several tries to find that out. She wasn’t the mothering sort, either. It’s pleasant to think that an angel came to Helen one night and whispered warnings in her ear, that if she procreated, her children would be violent and hungry, that they would be a plague on the world, and that as a result, she denied her urge to reproduce; but there are no indica tions that the world works this way. Everything seems to be a strange blend of free will and chance, and it was this heady mix ture that led Helen to make one last bad decision about a man who beat her to death in a SoHo hotel room one night. She was in her fifties then, near the same age her great-grandmother Marly

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  had been when she was trampled. She should have been home baking a pie and knitting, not lying in a pool of her own blood with a stomach full of Scotch. This is what was said by one of the cops who helped lift her body, who noted in her a resemblance to his own mother, and was disturbed by it.

  The year was 1975. For the first time in nearly a century and a quarter, the Musgrove house stood empty. It was not a showpiece house, but it was big. It was haunted by kind, anonymous spirits, the sort who merely watch, curious and lonely, never making a sound or disturbing anything. For a handful of years, the ghosts had the run of the place, until, like the old Captain, they began to grow bored, and slowly dissipated. The energy of the house and grounds experienced a brief surge whenever someone stopped to look, as though it were desperate to be lived in again. This was, in fact, the case. A house is like a person in this respect. It must be useful, or it dies. But finally Adencourt began to dim, like a candle drowning in its own wax, until the day the Harts showed up and peered in the windows. Francie thought she could almost cer tainly see things getting brighter inside before her very eyes, though she attributed that to the sun coming out from behind the clouds. Coltrane was already too busy calculating mortgage rates in his head to notice anything of the sort.

  Part Two

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  6‌

  The Prescription

  Coltrane and Francie did not prepare to leave New York until more than two months later. By then it was late November, and

  the weather had turned cold, threatening dire punishment on faithful and faithless alike. The bank had accepted Colt’s first of fer for the Pennsylvania house, with no attempt at negotiation— even though he’d deliberately underbid. Colt was surprised by this, and even a little suspicious, but not so Francie.

  “It’s proof the universe wants us to own it,” she said, delighted. “I knew it was going to work out like this! I just knew it.”

  “It’s proof there must be something wrong with it,” Colt said. “Think for a minute. It’s been sitting empty for twenty-five years. Why wouldn’t someone else have bought it by now?”

  “Because it was waiting for us,” Francie said. “Why do you al ways have to look for a reason for everything?”

  “Because there is a reason for everything. Things don’t just hap pen by themselves, Francie. They happen because something made them happen.”

  “I don’t care, I don’t care,” she sang. “It’s ours, and I love it.”

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  She looked around at the apartment that t
hey had shared for the past nine years. It had grown so cluttered with things that it was nearly impossible for a person to move: a dining room table that was far too big for their dining room; a credenza; a highboy; an overstuffed leather couch and chair; endless shelves of knick knacks and boxes of books that were all Francie’s, that had nowhere to live because the bookcases were already crammed full. When Colt had lived here alone, she remembered, he’d owned a couch, a bed, a television, and a refrigerator—nothing more. Man furniture. The place had looked like a gangster ’s hideout.

  These were all things that Francie had bought whimsically, but she could see now that they were destined not for the apartment but for some unknown dream home that she must have sensed in her future. At least, it seemed that way to her now. Finally, she thought, we will have room. To celebrate, she’d put on an old party hat and draped herself in a string of Christmas lights from the coat closet. She stood now, treelike, festooned in blinking red and green. “I should have looked it over more carefully,” Colt grumbled, ig noring her antics—although he had, in fact, hired a building in spector to go over the house with a finetooth comb. The inspector had found nothing wrong, at least nothing that wouldn’t be ex pected in a house as old as that. The wiring and plumbing were all up to code; the structural supports were sound. The basement didn’t leak and there were no termites. It was going to need a lot of cosmetic work, but there was no reason they couldn’t go live in it tomorrow, if they wanted to. In fact, said the inspector, he’d never seen a house of similar age in better condition, and he’d seen plenty much worse. All of this had only deepened Francie’s con viction that the place had been waiting for them all along; but Colt, his instincts honed on stone and whetted with blood, was